Everything New Is…Still Old?

Let's start: What did residents in key counties in Arizona, North Dakota and Nevada all have in common on Oct 15?

They received a print paper with the same front page and headline pic.twitter.com/14PH2IPHYz

— Miranda Green (@mirandacgreen) November 8, 2024

Metric is in a network of news sites that re-print one another, echo each other's talking points and lift up the voices of right-leaning think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and SBA Pro-Life

Reporting has also found it's a pay-to-play operationhttps://t.co/iaL3CJ1CsY

— Miranda Green (@mirandacgreen) November 8, 2024

What's key here is that its owner Brian Timpone is exploiting a crack in the news ecosystem.

As local news is diminishing and trust in mainstream national news has decreased, local readers still want news, they just don't know where to get it.

That's where pink slime steps in

— Miranda Green (@mirandacgreen) November 8, 20

Print and direct mail are hardly new technologies. But radio was when it was introduced commercially in the early 20th century. Radio slowly but surely provided a national voice to the nation, despite the political power of Hearst’s papers (which eventually gave way to radio and then television). An argument can be made that FDR taught the nation to think of radio as the unifying voice of the country, and WWII cemented the notion of one nation under news (along with the movie theater newsreels, which became film flown from Vietnam to NYC daily for national broadcast. Three major stations, but all reporting the same military PR, including daily “body counts,” accepted as gospel even though no one ever explained who was taking the morbid census.

Which means, yes, Noam Chomsky fans everywhere: the government was manufacturing consent. The Vietnam war went on as long as it did because The Greatest Generation accepted what the government told them, while their children saw through it. But guess who was in control?

Our parents generation’s trust in government became the Boomer’s distrust became J. Edgar treating MLK as a Commie threat, became reports on MK ULTRA and the Church Committee, became Watergate, and the sentiment (as it does), prodded by these and other events (especially the government siding with every group but white men; or at least white men thought so) moved from Left to Right as a political rallying cry.

The news consensus started coming apart with the retirements of Howard K. Smith, Walter Cronkite, and Huntley and Brinkley. First CNN filled the gap; then FoxNews, and finally the internet. Aided and abetted by the shifting state of cynicism towards those in charge.

And now we’re back to print and direct mail.  Same as it ever was, except now we don’t have Uncle Walter to reassure us “That’s the way it is” every evening across the country. If that means the electorate is poorly, or even wrongly, informed, well that’s how Hearst-Kane built Xanadu, and I can think of several would-be politicians who never were because they overestimated the knowledge, intelligence, and interest in policy of the American public.

And any number of successful politicians who didn’t.

The more things change, the more they remain the very damned same.